The Huawei Watch 2 was one of the first smartwatches to launch with Android Wear 2.0 (now known as Wear OS), so delivers the handy Google Assistant straight to your wrist. Other improvements include more ways to respond to messages from your wrist, including a new on-screen keyboard. Wear OS doesn’t quite rival Apple’s watchOS for app support, but it has a decent stable of apps you’d expect.

Garmin, known primarily for its GPS and fitness devices, has taken one step closer to full-featured smartwatches with their Vivoactive 3 Music. This model doesn't run on Wear OS (Google's increasingly-popular OS for wearables), but it does offer thousands of free apps, watch faces, and more via Garmin’s ConnectIQ store. The Vivoactive 3 Music also comes preloaded with 15 sports apps to monitor your progress whether you're running, swimming, lifting, or doing yoga — because, at its core, Garmin is still all about fitness tracking

Plus, these smartwatches are made by Fitbit, so they’re incredible fitness and health trackers. They both offer 24/7 heart rate tracking, on-screen workouts with Fitbit Coach, over 15 exercise modes, GPS (Connected GPS in the Versa’s case), and swim tracking thanks to their 5ATM rating. There’s also room to store your music, as well as Fitbit Pay support (Ionic and Special Edition Versa only).
(What you think of the Q watches’ design depends on which model you buy, and in which configuration. We tested a Q Explorist in its smoked stainless steel look and a Q Venture in rose gold with leather. But if you don’t like size of these two models or the available styles, you can buy one of more than 300 planned smartwatches from 14 of Fossil’s fashion brands and get the same technology inside, just with different cases, straps, and buttons. There are Kate Spade smartwatches, $200,000 Tag Heuer smartwatches, and many more from Diesel, Skagen, Armani Exchange, and the like, all offered under Fossil Group’s umbrella. You can probably find a smartwatch with a case, band, and look that looks like something you want to wear on your wrist every day, rather than settling for close enough. Fossil’s Q watches, though, hit a good balance of sensible and stylish, with a reasonable price to match.)
Apple Watch (1st generation and Series 1) Apple watchOS No 8.2+ (1st generation) 10.0+ (Series 1) Apple S1 (1st generation) Apple S1P 4.0 LE ] From paired iPhone No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes IPX7 Digital 1.7 / 1.5 319x390 / 272x340 AMOLED 1.5 250 / 205 Lithium-ion 42 mm / 38 mm 12.46 / 12.3 36.2 / 32.9 Varies Yes Yes No
I go for a middle-of-the-road approach—I enable alerts for most of my installed apps, save for ones that are niche (mostly shopping apps that alert me to coupons) or ones I don't use regularly. All alerts make the Charge 3 vibrate and show the message on its screen, and all past alerts live in the notification drawer that you can access by swiping down from the top of the Charge 3's display.

Smartwatches are still a relatively new electronics category, but these devices are poised to hit the mainstream. This year we saw major players such as LG and Motorola throw their smartwatches in the ring, along with Samsung, Sony, and a host of smaller companies like Pebble and Martian. And Apple finally confirmed its entry, the innovative Apple Watch, expected to arrive early in 2015.

Dealing with notifications on a Wear OS watch has gotten better as the phone version of Android has improved its already impressive notification system and as phone app developers have taken advantage of new interactions. Many apps now send notifications with action options: For example, you can check a to-do as done, approve a payment, respond to a message, or, most often, just acknowledge something. The Q Explorist and Venture are no different than most Wear OS watches in relaying notifications, but in our testing they rarely showed lag in processing them, nor was either watch’s screen unresponsive to swiping or tapping options. Each watch’s vibration motor provides just enough buzz and movement to avoid missing things while not feeling like electric collar training for humans.
If you’d prefer your smartwatch looked more like a piece of jewelry than a small computer on your wrist, you’ll like Skagen’s Falster range. The straps of these slimline watches come in a few different leather or stainless steel options but coupled with the included minimalist watch face designs, they all look sleek and stylish in a way few other smartwatches manage.
Our 19 contenders all promised to give us some distance from our phones by notifying us of incoming calls and texts. But we found that some smart watches were much slower than others at letting us know we had a call. It turns out the quality of the bluetooth connection determines how quickly you’ll be notified, with our worst performers only registering the call with two seconds to spare before diverting to voicemail (yes you, Montblanc) while others simply failed to display any calls at all.
In China, since around 2015, smartwatches have become widely used by schoolchildren. They are advertised on television throughout the country as a safety device whereby the child can call in case of emergency. The devices are commonly colorful and made of plastic. They normally have no display unless a button is pushed. These smartwatches have limited capability compared to other smartwatches; their main functions consist of being able to conduct calls, displaying of time, and sometimes have air temperature sensitivity. They cost around $100 to $200 USD.
Aside from its jack-of-all-fitness-trades, master-of-none nature, the Gear Sport has other drawbacks. Chief among them is that voice dictation is significantly less reliable than on the Apple Watch or Wear OS and is best used for short phrases and quick replies. Then there’s S Voice, the digital assistant that can’t do much—and you probably don’t have time to learn how to make it do the few things it can do. And major apps still do not have a presence in Samsung’s marketplace—the Sport runs Samsung’s Tizen operating system instead of Wear OS—so any app or device you want to control directly on your phone is a gamble on an indie developer having the same need.

Wirecutter writers have been researching, testing, and writing about smartwatches since early 2013, just after the first Pebble watches were shipped to Kickstarter backers. I’ve personally worn nearly every notable smartwatch since that first Pebble and have written about them for a number of publications, including IT World and Fast Company. I also have extensive experience with Android phones, having written the (since outdated) Complete Android Guide and numerous articles about Android. I also contribute to and help edit the Wirecutter guide to the best smartwatch for iPhones.

The LG G Watch, Samsung Gear Live, and Motorola Moto 360—the Android Wear models—have intuitive color touchscreen interfaces and were judged easiest to interact with. The Martian Notifier, Cookoo 2, and MetaWatch M1, which have push-button navigation, were determined to be the most difficult to use. In particular, the Cookoo 2's buttons were very hard to press.
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Several of them also now support wireless charging which is hugely valuable as you avoid adding yet another cable and cradle to your dresser. Wireless charging pads are on the market that will charge your compatible iPhone and watch at the same time, and Apple is set to release its own official charging pad dubbed AirPower. Wireless charging is also available for Samsung smartphones and smartwatches.

Smart watches are more than for just tech lovers. Today’s smart watches are packed with health and fitness monitoring features to stay motivated and improve your health over time including pedometer (step count), precision heart rate monitor, sleep tracking, sedentary reminder and even GPS. Water resistant designs make them especially ideal for both sports and outdoor use. Android smart watches also help you to stay organized in your busy life, working in tandem with other devices, such as connecting to your smart phone via Bluetooth to show incoming calls and notification alerts. Style matters too: that’s why our extensive range offers great designs suitable for urban wear, sports, and outdoor wear. So whether you’re shopping for smart watches for men or smart watches for women, our affordable deals provide the perfect blend of versatility, style and features.

* Advertised Price Per Month: The advertised price per month is the estimated monthly payment required to be made on your WebBank/Fingerhut Advantage Credit Account for a single item order, or if at any time your account has multiple items on it, then please see the payment chart for payment terms. The advertised price per month will not apply. See Full Cost of Ownership.

Smartwatches, like smart phones, can also run apps, via your smart phone or right on the watch. These include health and fitness apps (thus the comparison with activity trackers), apps that control functions such as music and the camera on your phone, navigation apps, and more. Because most smartwatches have open software platforms (at least so far), developers are coming up with new and innovative apps that can increase the functionality of the devices.
But the Ionic, the first of Fitbit's devices to include an SpO2 monitor, came out more than one year ago. It's frustrating to hear about exciting features that are "coming soon," when "soon" ultimately means not weeks or months, but years. While I understand it takes time and effort to develop features like this (especially if Fitbit hopes to pursue medical device clearance or approval from the FDA in the future), I don't think Fitbit should hype features that it isn't ready to let users put to the test.
In addition, the TicWatch Pro has an IP68 rating for water and dust resistance, along with its own heart rate monitor and GPS hardware. It has the Qualcomm Snapdragon 2100 processor inside, along with 512MB of RAM and 4GB of onboard storage. It’s available now in either black or silver colors on Amazon for $249, but at the moment it’s exclusive for members of Amazon Prime until August 15. You can read a lot more about the TicWatch Pro in our extensive review.

The Watch 2 comes in two varieties, Sports and Classic. The former is a little cheaper, looking unsurprisingly much like a standard sports watch. The Classic is noticeably more attractive, with a premium-looking shell and included leather band. If you’re after something that’s appropriate at a nice restaurant as well as the gym, you may want to pay the extra money, but all features are otherwise the same.

Flaws but not dealbreakers: Wear OS, Google’s name for Android for smartwatches, still feels like a work in progress, and in our testing, the Google Assistant voice feature frequently dropped responses—though that could improve via software updates. The Q line’s button at the 3 o’clock position is easy to accidentally trigger, bringing up Google Assistant and sometimes sending it nonsense questions. Wear OS also lacks a left-handed mode to allow you to switch the watch around. On the workout front, Fossil Q watches lack a heart rate monitor, so they’re not able to detect workouts or help with pacing; and the size of these models—and most Android smartwatches, really—and the touchscreen interface make workouts more difficult to monitor and pause than with a dedicated fitness tracker.

The Fitbit Ionic works fine as a Fitbit tracker, but despite being more expensive than our picks or the Apple Watch Series 1, it lacks many smartwatch functions you’d hope to have. It passes notifications from your phone to the watch, but you can only respond to some of them (with only five quick reply lines); and dismissing them (either one by one or as a group) involves annoyingly hard presses and long scrolls. Syncing music files and offline Pandora playlists requires you to use a desktop app, which is laborious. Two Wirecutter writers who tested the Ionic also had trouble setting it up to work with their Android phones (a 2015 Moto X Pure and a 2016 Samsung Galaxy S7) and had to perform significant troubleshooting to get their data to sync. The Ionic’s battery life, even while using GPS for outdoor exercise tracking, is its most impressive feature, lasting at least five days in one test and nearly seven days in another. The Ionic is most useful to Fitbit enthusiasts who want to track outdoor exercise without bringing a phone; it’s not a good option if you’re looking to deal with incoming information.

If you don’t need your smartwatch to look business-casual, you want more fitness and exercise features than our top pick, or you’re a Samsung loyalist, the Samsung Gear Sport is a better pick for you. (You can use the Gear Sport with non-Samsung phones, but doing so requires that you install at least four apps.) The Gear Sport handles all the casual notification and message-triage functions of a smartwatch about as well as our top pick—with the exception of voice transcription—but it adds heart-rate monitoring, GPS tracking, swim tracking, and built-in reminders to move throughout the day. It doesn’t do all of these things perfectly, but it does just enough to make for a generally useful smartwatch, with great battery life and a clever interface.
Using your voice with the Google Assistant function built into the Q watches (and every modern Wear OS watch) is generally okay, though only roughly 80 percent reliable. The combination of a microphone on the side of your watch, a Bluetooth connection to your phone when you’re away from Wi-Fi, your phone’s cellular Web connection, and the imperfect acknowledgement of human speech by Google Assistant do not make for anything near a 100 percent success rate. When it works, Google Assistant makes you feel connected and advanced; when it fails, you can be seen as a person who asks their wrist about the capital of Malaysia. This is more a reflection of the state of connectivity and digital assistants than of the Q watches themselves—or any Wear OS watch, for that matter—although in our experience Wear OS watches fail on voice queries more often than Siri on the Apple Watch. That said, voice dictation on the Q watches is far more reliable, at least when it comes to recognizing words and phrases, than Google Assistant. If transcription fails, it’s more likely to be because of the watch/phone connection than the watch mishearing your words.

The Huawei Watch 2 comes into its own if you’re looking for a smartwatch that can double as a sports watch, thanks to built-in GPS and a heart rate monitor on its rear. Use the 4GB of built-in storage to save your Google Play Music playlists offline and you can pair Bluetooth headphones for a phone-free experience. The Huawei Watch 2 will work with Huawei’s own suite of fitness apps, Google Fit, or other third-party apps such as Strava, offering excellent choice.

Receive Texts, Emails, And Alerts Without Reaching For Your Phone/ Military-Grade Gear S3 Is Tough Enough To Handle The Elements/ Built-In S Health App, Track Your Steps, Monitor Your Heart Rate, And More/ 4GB Internal Memory/ RAM 768MB/ Wi-Fi/ Bluetooth 4.2/ Gorilla Glass SR+ Case Crystal/ 1GHz, Dual Core (Exynos7270) Processor/ 360x360 Display Resolution/ On-Cell Touch AMOLED Touchscreen/ GPS Navigation/ Dark Grey Finish
My personal favorite watch for Android on the market today actually isn’t an Android Wear device, rather coming from Samsung and running atop Tizen. The Samsung Gear S3 Frontier is all the smartwatch you’ll ever need, with a sporty, circular gray design with a 1.3-inch Super AMOLED display that is the best I’ve personally ever used and is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass SR+.
The era of the smartwatch is upon us – just look at the multitude of colourful straps and elongated or squarish screens people are wearing. From fitness trackers like the Fitbit and Garmin to the Samsung Gear and Apple Watch, there are a host of great options to combine fitness and activity tracking and message alerts on your watch, which incidentally will still tell you the time, along with the weather and even play your favourite music.
The Huawei Watch 2 was one of the first smartwatches to launch with Android Wear 2.0 (now known as Wear OS), so delivers the handy Google Assistant straight to your wrist. Other improvements include more ways to respond to messages from your wrist, including a new on-screen keyboard. Wear OS doesn’t quite rival Apple’s watchOS for app support, but it has a decent stable of apps you’d expect.
Built-in GPS and a great workout coach make the Huawei Watch 2 a great companion on long runs and intense workouts. You can leave your phone behind, too, thanks to onboard music storage and the ability to connect Bluetooth headphones to the watch. Like the LG Watch Sport, the Huawei Watch 2 has an LTE version, but unfortunately, Huawei isn't selling that model in the US yet.
(What you think of the Q watches’ design depends on which model you buy, and in which configuration. We tested a Q Explorist in its smoked stainless steel look and a Q Venture in rose gold with leather. But if you don’t like size of these two models or the available styles, you can buy one of more than 300 planned smartwatches from 14 of Fossil’s fashion brands and get the same technology inside, just with different cases, straps, and buttons. There are Kate Spade smartwatches, $200,000 Tag Heuer smartwatches, and many more from Diesel, Skagen, Armani Exchange, and the like, all offered under Fossil Group’s umbrella. You can probably find a smartwatch with a case, band, and look that looks like something you want to wear on your wrist every day, rather than settling for close enough. Fossil’s Q watches, though, hit a good balance of sensible and stylish, with a reasonable price to match.)
Samsung’s three second-generation smartwatches arrived with real improvements and refinements. At $300, the Gear 2 is the most sophisticated—and expensive—of the trio. The Gear 2 Neo is basically a less expensive version of the Gear 2: It has similar functionality, but it's housed in a plastic body instead of metal and has no built-in camera. And the slimmer Gear Fit is a hybrid smartwatch and activity tracker.
When you do switch to the OLED display, you are in TicWatch Pro’s Smart Mode, and you can perform all of the features and functions that are available in the smartwatch. However, switching to the low-power FTSN LCD display puts the watch in its Essential Mode. The nice thing is that when you switch back to Smart Mode. all of the heart rate and steps info gathered by the watch’s Essential Mode are synced up and transferred to the onboard Wear OS. As you might expect, the battery life in Essential Mode can last up to 30 days, while using the smartwatch in Smart Mode cuts that battery life down to just two days.
Battery life and charging options: Charging your smartwatch is a hassle and the biggest downside to trading in your manually-wound or button battery-powered watch. A Fitbit Versa might last 3 - 4 days between charges, but a smartwatch like the Samsung Gear Sport or Apple Watch will need recharging every couple of days and sometimes every night if you are tapping on the screen regularly and using its apps.
But with a wider choice comes deeper deliberation. What's the difference between a fully digital dial, and a 'smart optimised' analog? What features will actually aid your day-to-day? And which would be totally useless? To answer these questions, and more, we've picked through the best smartwatches on the market to suit your no doubt very busy, hectic and urbane lifestyle.
Garmin has been putting out go-to smartwatches for sports lovers for a while now. Running, cycling, swimming, golf - Garmin has had us well and truly covered. Despite the Forerunner name, the 645 Music is more in the mould of the Vivoactive 3 Music. It's got a similar look and also brings the music this time. This helps make the Garmin more of a smartwatch rival to the Apple Watch, Samsung Gear or Fitbit Ionic than before.
The Apple Watch boasts cutting-edge smartwatch tech including mobile payments with Apple Pay, stand-alone GPS, full waterproofing up to 50 meters, and thousands of apps. The user interface is very simple and attractive. It's easy to use and it has advanced, easy-to-use fitness tracking features, thanks to a plethora of sensors and an excellent heart rate monitor.
If you’d prefer your smartwatch looked more like a piece of jewelry than a small computer on your wrist, you’ll like Skagen’s Falster range. The straps of these slimline watches come in a few different leather or stainless steel options but coupled with the included minimalist watch face designs, they all look sleek and stylish in a way few other smartwatches manage.
We actually got our hands on over a dozen of these smart watches just to get a feel for what it was like to use them. While all of them came with at least one main button (or a home button if you’re an iPhone-user), the ones that stood out had scrolling down to a science. On such a small screen, swiping isn’t always the most ideal form of navigation. Some of the best smart watches for navigation, we found, had twistable dials or bezels you could turn.